He swoons out of pity for Francesca because of his own literary beginnings in the poetry of courtly love. As a citizen of Florence, the Pilgrim is quite naturally interested in Farinata, since he saved his native city from destruction. And as a lover of classical literature, Dante the Pilgrim would have given anything to have read Homer’s epic in Greek, and he would never have passed up the opportunity to chat with Ulysses, Homer’s most complex character and, in the Poet’s view, the archetypal evil counselor. Contemporary critics have managed to agree on at least a general piece of advice about reading the Inferno: the judgments of Dante the Pilgrim must be distinguished from those of Dante the Poet. While the Pilgrim may be sentimental and compassionate over souls he encounters, the Poet shares the vantage point of God and the verdict of eternity. The Poet’s condemnation of sin is as relentless and as unforgiving as that of God. Unlike Milton in Paradise Lost, Dante would never have imagined that the ways of God need to be justified to man, and he would never have conceived of a Lucifer that could even mistakenly be taken as an epic hero. Of crucial importance is the moral development of the Pilgrim as the poem unfolds. Eventually, by the time the Pilgrim spies Lucifer, he has begun to share the vantage point of his maker Dante the Poet, who, in turn, shares that of the Divine Creator. This moral development based on the education and experience of the Pilgrim that Dante the Poet hopes will be replicated in the reader represents the major theme of the entire work.

A second important consideration concerns the vexing issue of allegory in medieval poetry. Dante constantly insists that what he saw in a journey through the afterlife was true. As Charles S. Singleton, one of Dante’s greatest American interpreters never tired of emphasizing, the key fiction of The Divine Comedy is that the poem is true. Dante wants his readers to believe that what they see, feel, and hear in his poem did actually occur. The work is not just an intellectual pastime for an exiled intellectual. Medieval literature is often described as a literature of allegory. In an allegorical reading of the Inferno, the reader would constantly be forced to identify characters with abstract ideas: Dante is Everyman, Virgil is Human Reason, and so forth. Everything in the poem would thus become a vast and impersonal puzzle. The reader’s function would involve identifying what each of the characters stood for and observing the relationships and interplay among them. The result would be a lifting of the veil of allegory and a revealing or uncovering of the secret meaning underneath. That concealed meaning would of necessity involve an even more abstract kind of idea: love, death, evil, sin, heresy, treachery, and so forth.

However, such allegorical abstractions are simply not what Dante’s great poem is all about. To understand Dante’s position on allegory and historical truth, it is first necessary to understand that serious medieval thinkers (theologians, philosophers—not poets) considered poetry to be a fiction that did not tell the truth. Quite rightly, allegorical poems that used characters to represent abstract qualities could not be literally true and were considered “fables” in the pejorative sense. Dante wanted his reader—including serious thinkers—to consider his poem to be a true account of an actual journey. Even if the reader willfully suspends his or her disbelief in the reality of the poem’s action and believes that this fantastical journey actually took place, a traditional allegorical poem would simply not serve his purposes. For it would place more emphasis on the abstract ideas contained in the poem than on the characters themselves.

The method that Dante employed in his work, and one that he suggests in a late letter to Cangrande della Scala, is quite different from the traditional allegory typical of works such as The Romance of the Rose or Pilgrim’s Progress. Contrary to the allegory of the poets, Dante accepted at least in part what was known as the allegory of the theologians. This involved bearing in mind four possible senses of a text: the historical or literal; the allegorical; the moral or tropological ; and the anagogical. Such a method derived from reading holy scriptures, particularly the relationship between the historical and the allegorical senses. For example, in most Christian services regardless of the denomination, the ritual requires a reading of a passage from the Old Testament followed by, or juxtaposed to, a reading of a passage from the New Testament. In most cases, the Old Testament text prefigures or anticipates that of the New Testament, which fulfills or explains elements of the Old Testament.